


This Ain’t the Right Time For You to Fall in Love With Me

by theshipsfirstmate



Series: Things Happen [3]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, everybody figures it out, post-4x11, things happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 08:29:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5960824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>post-4x11 Laurel x Cisco. The girls all realized it at different times.</p><p>"He’s brave enough to work on The Flash’s team, bold enough to try for a kiss from the Black Canary (even if it was liquid courage). He is, at the very least, worthy of a shot. Plus, it’s gotta mean something that he’s got Laurel this flustered. Maybe it’s a good kind of different."</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Ain’t the Right Time For You to Fall in Love With Me

_post-4x11 Laurel x Cisco. The girls all realized it at different times._

_Part three of “Things Happen,” because it references[Behold the Magnetism](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5391986) and [Let’s Make a List](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5743504)._

_Title from “[Dark Times](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdI_Uk6CYNk)” by Ed Sheeran & The Weeknd._

 

**This Ain’t the Right Time For You to Fall in Love With Me**

Thea first realizes it when Laurel gets back from Central City after their first bout with Vandal Savage. It’s still morning, but she’s been up for hours when Laurel busts through the apartment door, looking disheveled, and like she hasn’t really slept.

“Hey, how was Sara?”

“She was, uh, good,” Laurel answers lightly, but like it’s fake. She’s not lying exactly, but there’s something off about the sentiment.

“Everything okay?”

“What? Yeah...yes, of course.” She takes a seat on the couch next to Thea, and looks at the TV like it’s on. It’s not. If she didn’t know her better, Thea might have guessed her friend was stoned. “We went to a bar, we actually um...we ran into Cisco.”

“S.T.A.R. Labs Cisco?”

“Yeah.” It’s a non-answer that actually poses more questions than it resolves. But Laurel’s eyes are all dreamy, like she’s lost in a memory, so Thea’s left fishing for details.

“Was it uh, weird, him meeting Sara?”

“Huh? Oh, no,” Laurel answers with a laugh that sounds light and foreign. “He’s a...big fan of the Canaries.”

That feels like a step in the right direction. Thea watches the corners of her mouth twitch, like she’s fighting a smile. “Is that right?”

“He was drunk,” Laurel confesses, voice going low and serious. Maybe that was the problem, but before Thea can ask, she continues. “He kissed me.”

 _Oh_. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Again, it’s not an answer. This time, Thea lets it marinate a little longer.

“Wait, I’m sorry,” she says finally, speaking softly as she interrupts Laurel’s little reverie. “Is the problem that he kissed you, or that you’re worried he didn’t mean it because he was drunk?”

“He _didn’t_ mean it,” Laurel answers, too quickly, biting down on her lower lip. “It’s nothing, he loves the Black Canary and had a half-gallon of margaritas. It doesn’t... _count_.” 

So _that’s_ the problem. Thea thought they were maybe a little flirty when the two teams worked together, but she didn’t pay it much mind. Laurel’s default mode with most is charm and disarm. But the way she’s reacting now tells another story. _He loves the Black Canary,_ she says, trying for nonchalant and failing -- _it doesn’t count_ \-- landing somewhere between smitten and resigned. Maybe this guy’s someone else entirely.

“Maybe he _did_ mean it,” Thea offers. “Maybe he’s just chicken.”

“No,” Laurel says emphatically. It’s the first time her voice has risen above that dreamy whisper. That’s when Thea knows for sure. “No, he’s not. He’s brave, just as brave as any of us.”

I’m impossible not to believe her, her conviction is just as clear as the slight tremble of panic that laces her words. When Thea asks what comes next, she recoils visibly.

 _“What?”_ It’s more breath than question.

“What happened after he kissed you?” Thea rephrases the question, going easier on her. But the answer’s still a surprise.

“I snuck back in this morning and left him a breakfast burrito.” Laurel just leaves her with just that, grinning and turning for her bedroom, leaving Thea to comb through her memories of Team Flash’s resident stylist.

Cisco’s not what she would have expected for Laurel, but what about their life is predictable, really? She knows he’s a tech whiz, if not Felicity-caliber, at least close. He’s brave enough to work on The Flash’s team, bold enough to try for a kiss from the Black Canary (even if it was liquid courage). He is, at the very least, worthy of a shot. Plus, it’s gotta mean something that he’s got Laurel this flustered. Maybe it’s a good kind of different.

A hero falling in love with a genius behind the scenes, someone who knows them entirely and stands beside them anyway. It’s not like it’s unheard of.

 

* * *

 

Sara first realizes it when Laurel trusts him enough to make her White Canary suit.

She suspects it, of course, the first night she meets Cisco, when the adorable genius was wobbling on his barstool, reminding her of Felicity Smoak on “aspirin,” waxing poetic about her sister. The way he straightened up when Laurel arrived told her everything else she needed to know, though it was her sister's flustered reaction after she dropped him off that had been the most surprising.

But then, Laurel shows her the suit Cisco designed, the one she vaguely remembers him mentioning that night. It’s perfect, they both know it, and when her sister calls him “industrious,” it sounds to Sara like the word has garnered itself a few more definitions.

“No mask, that was your idea?” she asks again.

Laurel’s still over her shoulder, but Sara can see her eyes drop to the ground in the reflection on the display case. “Had a little help,” she mumbles against her shoulder.

That’s something significant in itself, that her sister accepts the assistance from Cisco, trusts him implicitly with this and seemingly everything else. She hasn’t let someone in like that, maybe ever. Again, Sara thinks of Oliver and Felicity, remembering their early days, when they were too blind to notice how they were tethered to each other, whipping one another about like a rag doll as they ignored the obvious.

After a beat, she can’t stop herself from asking, trying in the most roundabout way she can think of. Sara wants desperately for her sister to be that happy, but pushing her into something won’t work at all. “Tell him thanks?” 

Laurel just smiles, lifting her eyes to meet her sister’s in their reflection. That’s when Sara knows it for sure.

c

 

* * *

 

Felicity first realizes it when Thea and Laurel come over for a movie night after their A.R.G.U.S. adventure. Oliver’s pulling a late night with Alex at the campaign office, and it’s kind of nice to spend time with the two of them during which she’s not tracking them via computer as they head out on life-threatening missions.

“So, how are you feeling?” Thea asks, and Felicity almost laughs bitterly, something she finds herself tamping down more often of late. It’s not like Oliver's sister is much better off, she reminds herself.

“Ah, I’m just finally glad the heavy duty painkillers are out of my system,” she sighs. That’s the truth, at least.

“You see anything weird?” Laurel asks, with a knowing look that Thea nods at before mirroring. Oh, right.

“Myself,” she admits, letting one of those laughs slip. “My old, angry, goth, hactivist self came and talked to me.”

“Ooh, a goth girl,” Laurel croons, because of course that's the part she picks out. “I always saw Sara when I got super high. Which is now weird in a different way.”

“Hmm, I saw Ollie sometimes,” Thea chimes in, “but I didn’t know that was like, a thing.”

Laurel just nods. “Seems to be. Though, we’re a particularly ill-fated sample.”

“You’re not wrong about that,” Felicity agrees, reaching down as her cell phone buzzes. She comprehends the words at the same time she reads them aloud, “Jeez, speaking of, Barry just texted me…”

“Bad week?” Thea asks. Felicity doesn’t notice it for a moment, but Laurel seems frozen in place.

“Sounds like it,” she answers. “Oh shit, he...he says Cisco almost _died_.”

Her sentence is punctuated by a sharp gasp from somewhere else, and when she looks up, Thea’s eyes are locked on Laurel. Later, she’ll tell Oliver about it, how the other woman went white as a sheet. How her reaction lit the match on a painful memory Felicity had stashed away deep.

_“I knew that look,” she tells him. “I remembered it from the mirror last year.”_

_Oliver had just held her tighter, curled himself around her as she sorted through the rest of her recollection. It was a revelation, really, Felicity had known there was something there, between the two of them._ “He won’t shut up about Laurel,” _is a text Barry’s sent her more than once, but for Cisco’s sake, she was worried about the balance of things. Of course, like every other significant moment in their lives, it takes a tragedy for everyone’s true feelings to make their way to the light._

“I have to…” Laurel starts, and when she chokes on the end of the sentence, that’s when Felicity knows for sure.

“Go,” she interrupts. “You should go.”

Laurel just nods, tersely, and bolts, palming her leather jacket on her way out the door to make sure she’s got her phone and keys.

 

* * *

 

Laurel first realizes it when she’s standing outside Cisco’s apartment, without a single memory of the drive to Central City. When the door opens, she figures she must have knocked.

“ _Paj--_ Laurel?” When she sees his face, Felicity’s words echo in her head. She almost lost him too, this man who looks at her like she’s a shooting star, who has a nickname for her in his native tongue.

“Hey, I…” She probably should have come up with an excuse on the way here. “Barry...Felicity said you almost... and I just…”

She finally trails off at probably the most inopportune time, and she’s worried that the moment her breath hitches reveals more than she’s ready to. But it happens, and he tries his best to look unfazed. It does make her feel better that he fails a little.

“You want to come in?” It’s the third time she’s been here, but the first time he’s offered.

“Yeah, ok.”

Laurel takes a step inside the door and instantly remembers leaving the last time she was here. The coffee he woke up to make for her warm in her hand -- she still has his travel mug -- his smile, beatific, after she kissed him goodbye.

It’s like he reads her mind. “You want some coffee?”

“No thanks, I’m…” She’s shaking, she realizes, looking down at her trembling hands. “I’m all good.”

“Sure,” he answers with something of an icy chuckle that neither warms nor believes her. 

He puts the pot of water on the stove anyway, and she wonders if she has any right to have missed that. That small thing, that simple detail. She wants to ask him why her go-to Starbucks order doesn’t taste like it used to, not since he made her coffee with the colador. She wants to ask him a dozen different questions, but she doesn’t get a chance to start.

“I almost died.” She knew that already and somehow, hearing it from his lips twists the knife of anguish in her chest.

“Cisco…” The name stutters from her lips.

When she can’t find an end for the sentence, he turns to face her, with a look on his face she can’t quite read. “That’s why you’re here? Because I almost died?”

That’s not a question she can answer right now. So she shoots one back. “What happened?”

“I vibed out,” he tells her, with a shake of his head, turning back to the stove. Immediately, she wishes he would look at her again. “They had to let Reverse Flash go to save my life.”

Laurel answers with one of the only certainties she’s got left. “I’m glad they did.”

He turns back to lock eyes with her, and she holds her breath to take in his disbelieving, disquieting gaze. “You don't know the Reverse Flash.”

“I don’t need to.”

“I think you’re wrong,” Cisco tells her, and it’s not combative, just matter-of-fact with a kind of slumped-over resignation. “It was my fault, I taunted him. I just wanted…”

He trails off and she can almost feel his energy -- his _anger_ \-- build, it practically fills the room as the water on the stove begins to boil. When she thinks he’s almost vibrating with emotion, it takes a second before she realizes that might actually be a possibility.

“I wanted some kind of retribution, you know?” he continues. His brow is furrowed, and she’s struck with the urge to use her fingers to sooth away the angry creases. “You should _get_ that, when someone takes a life.”

That’s when Laurel knows it for sure. But she doesn’t tell him right away. Instead, she rounds the island, reaching across him to turn off the burner under the boiling pot. He takes a step back, and she slides between him and the stove, grabbing the oven mitt.

“Yeah…” She finally breathes a response, pouring the water over the grounds in the filter. He seems to settle as the scented steam rises from the glass bowl, breathing deep. “Yeah, you should.”

Cisco steps back toward the countertop, slightly behind her and just to the right. He’s so close, and when she glances over her shoulder, there's a fire behind his gaze that she wasn't expecting. The surprise, and Cisco's voice when he speaks, amps up whatever's fluttering in her chest and abdomen. “What are you doing here, Laurel?” The question is soft, but so heavy with importance.

“I just needed... “ She rests the empty pot back on the stove, and then, when she turns back to him, there’s finally nothing left to do with her hands. She takes a chance, resting them on his shoulders, and when his eyes close, for just a moment, she dares to run a finger through the ends of his long hair. “I needed to see you. To see if you were ok.”

“I’m ok,” he answers, looking deep into her eyes, like he’s searching for the answer to a question he doesn’t want to ask.

“I’m glad,” she tells him again. “In that case, I just needed to see you.”

It's the shorter answer, but it is closer to the truth, and it makes his eyes change, like he found his answer. She spends every ounce of hope she's got left pleading silently for it to be the right one, because she really wants to kiss him again. He nuzzles against her nose, hands traversing their way around her waist and then --

“Hold on a second.” He closes his eyes tight, like even he's annoyed by his own hesitation. “I told you last time, I…” 

“Nobody's got a broken heart, Cisco," Laurel remembers with a smile. "You're okay?"

He just nods, assuring her again with a crooked smile she can't help but return.

"Then my heart is just fine."

She knows for sure. And she'll tell him just as soon as he's done kissing her.

 


End file.
